So apparently there are now only six dirty words left you can’t say – in comic books, anyway.
DC’s “Secret Six” No. 14, now available, drops an s-bomb.
The moment comes when the Ventriloquist gets stabby with her super-villain allies as they try to rescue one of their own from the League of Assassins.
The Ventriloquist’s dummy Ferdie objects to her betrayal. And then Ferdie starts to losing all feeling in his wooden limbs and can’t understand what’s happening to him.
And the Ventriloquist’s reply?
“Then you shouldn’t have been such a traitorous little shit.”
The moment is surprising, given that this is a mainstream, non-Vertigo book.
The comic is rated “Teen +” or Teen plus, similar to most of DC’s titles.
If you accept the comics rating system matches the movie rating system (and I frankly hate the idea that literature is sold with ratings, but that’s a rant for another post), then the expletive is appropriate. PG-13 movies are allowed a share of s-bombs.
You can view this moment as another reflection of real life intruding in the comics or just the general coarsening of pop culture.
And you have to wonder: Now that the line has been crossed in one regular book, why not all of them? Will Batman drop an F-bomb the next time the Joker attacks?
Have no fear that the “Secret Six” will be cursing up a storm, though.
This is the final issue, and that saddens me. Simone plots intricate stories and writes the most compelling anti-heroes.
One less book on my pull list to look forward to.
Well, (expletive) me.
I used a four-letter word once in my poetry and came to regret it. We use those words in our everyday conversations, but in writing they just attract attention to themselves.
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Yeah, it’s all about context. In my civilian life, I have been known, to, umm, OK, curse like a demented sailor running out of oxygen on occasion. But I do sometimes drop an F-bomb in my writing to punctuate a point – usually about a Marvel book. Funny, that.
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It’s not the profanity that bugs me about this, but that it’s another step removed from the whimsical style of Silver Age comic books towards the cynical, ‘realistic’ tripe they offer today.
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It is dark. And it’s coming at a time when DC’s creative czar Geoff Johns has stated he wants to move the company away from all that with the reboot. I wonder if someone figured, “Hey, it’s the last issue. Let’s just go for it.”
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